Justin setting the fire in Walmart.
“Solomon,” I whispered. “Come here?”
He stood, and came to my side.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Just stupid Justin,” he said. “It’s a good picture, though. You captured how stupid he is.”
“Thanks,” I said, stepping back from the developer, mind racing, wondering what this meant, what I could do with this.
Solomon couldn’t see it. But—I thought, with sudden, electric certainty—what if Justin could? It was an unbelievable idea, an impossible one. Yet somehow it felt like another puzzle piece falling into place.
“Go upstairs and make us some tea?” I asked Solomon. “I have work to do.”
He went.
My phone rang. Connor. I answered it immediately, smearing the phone with wet chemicals.
“What the hell, Ash? What’s the emergency that has you blowing up my phone?”
“Connor, thank god.” I looked at my phone—it was almost eleven. Plenty of time before school let out. “Wait for us after school, okay? Me and Solomon are going to pick you up.”
Silence. “Solomon? Is everything okay?”
“Basically,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to lie. “We just want to talk to you, that’s all.”
A sound from upstairs. Solomon fumbling around in the cabinets. “Solomon hates me,” Connor said.
“Solomon has never hated you,” I said. “And . . . I can’t explain it now. We’ll pick you up by the side cafeteria door right when the last bell rings, okay? Don’t get a ride with anyone else. Anyone.”
Especially your father.
“Fine,” he said, sounding small, sounding young. “I was gonna call you anyway. Got a few discussion topics of my own.”
I’ll add them to the meeting agenda, I started to say, but he had already hung up.
A whole lot of work was ahead of me. Two hundred and fifty exposures, five to ten of each player, with one frame of each circled in black Sharpie.
I poured out fresh chemicals, savoring the sharp stink of them, and got to work. Solomon came down, with two cups of tea and his transistor radio.
“Weird weather today, children,” Ms. Jackson said. She always called her listeners children, like she was older than absolutely everyone in earshot. “All that glorious warm sunshine seems to be fading fast, and the mercury is dropping along with it.”
I told Solomon about the call from Connor. We each took a long sip of tea.
Fifty-Four
Solomon
“Weird weather today, children,” Ms. Jackson said, on the radio perched on the table between us. “Might want to bundle up after all, wear a sweater or two under your Unmasking Day disguise.”
I opened my eyes. Maraud’s face was inches from my own, staring at me with great concern. Her real face, not that pathetic rusty thing she had been in—wherever that horrible place was.
“Hey, girl!” I said, with a laugh, and hugged her huge snout. “I went away for a second. But I’m really happy to be back.”
Pterodactyls squawked in the dockside air overhead. The smell of the riversea was strong. I breathed it in deep. I’d never have imagined I could be so happy to smell kraken ink.
Ash asked, “What happened to you?”
“I went somewhere,” I said. “Somewhere horrible. What about you?”
“I just saw a lot of weird shit.”
“Nothing that could help us find Niv and Connor?”
“A couple things might be clues. I have to go back under.”
Ms. Jackson continued: “News now on the story that has the whole city talking—the abduction of the Refugee Princess.”
“Shit,” Ash and I said at the same time.
“With no word yet on her whereabouts—and in light of recent violent incidents all over the city—the Darkside Police Department has been conducting raids on known othersider gathering places.” Ms. Jackson sounded as unhappy as we were, about this abuse of authority. “Queen Carmen has so far not responded to Commissioner Bahrr’s call for a sunset curfew on all othersiders, and while the police department has no power to take a step like that without royal approval, the commissioner maintains that the city charter does grant him full authority to ask all uniformed officers to conduct random stops of Darkside citizens, and detain any othersiders for further questioning—”
Ash switched the radio off.
“He can’t do that,” I whispered.
“He’s doing it,” she said. “He’s been waiting for this moment for a long time, and the Shield finally handed it to him. If I hadn’t—”
“Stop saying that this is your fault,” I said. “This city was full of hate and fear long before the Night of Red Diamonds.”
She did not look convinced.
“We have to get in touch with your mother,” I said.
Fifty-Five
Ash
After the fifth time I nodded off, standing there in the darkroom with my fingers in the tray of stop bath, I decided I needed a nap. Solomon said that sounded like a great idea. We went up to my room, spooned together on the bed. I set my alarm for two hours.
What I needed was some good deep empty dreamless sleep, but as soon as I shut my eyes I was . . . somewhere else.
I was not in my bedroom. Not in Hudson.
Solomon and I still lay together. His forehead was still pressed into the back of my neck. But we were in a weird little hut that smelled like sweet milk tea. And there were birds calling outside that sounded like no birds I’d ever heard.
I got up and went to the window. Thinking I was ready for what I would see.
I was not ready.
Not for the massive bridge that arced overhead, a hundred times bigger than any bridge in the real world. Not for the old woman pushing a shopping cart, accompanied by a velociraptor. And not for the little kids practicing magic, summoning up images of monsters.
The other side. Where I was the Refugee Princess.
And it wasn’t just the world around me that was different. I was different too. I felt it inside. Some of it felt like weird fuzziness, as if I was drugged or half asleep.
Some of it felt . . . amazing. My arms tingled.
And I could see things. Whatever I wanted to see.
The Truth, even.
I lay back down beside Solomon. Still asleep, he wrapped his arms around me again. I shut my eyes to breathe in the smell of him. Of this moment.
I cannot keep you safe, I thought.
Fifty-Six
Solomon
Ash opened her eyes. She’d had them shut for fifteen minutes, fingers twitching like she was shuffling through a deck of cards.
“I know where they are,” she said.
“Connor and Niv?”
“Yeah. Darkside Cinema Palace. I saw it. And I can control it, now—what I see.”
We lay there in Radha’s hut, listening to children laugh outside. I wanted to ask her to show me Connor, see how they were treating him. But if it was bad, I didn’t want to know.
Ash stood up. Went to the window, and smiled at whatever she saw out there. I wondered if she had gone away as well. To whatever awful, magicless world I’d been to.
She tilted her head to one side, and then the other. Flexed her hands together in front of her.
The spell was gone. I could see that now. Nothing was holding her back.
She did not need me.
“We should go,” I said. I debated waking Radha. Her powers would certainly come in handy. But the Shield’s headquarters would be packed with angry, powerful soldiers and I felt weirdly certain that we would be walking into our own doom. I couldn’t get Radha hurt too.
“First, I need to try to reach my mother,” Ash said.
“Okay,” I said, but neither one of us moved. The smell of the river was strong. Birds squawked in the air overhead.
I didn’t want the moment to end. Soon this would all be over, one way or another. One or both of us would go
down in the attempt to rescue our friends—but even if we emerged victorious, she was still the princess. In the unlikely best-case scenario where we brought down the Shield and saved the city and she reclaimed her rightful place running it, she’d have a whole crowded life with very little room for me. She would leave me behind forever.
Either way, I felt like she was already half gone.
Fifty-Seven
Ash
“It happened more than once,” Solomon said.
The smell of the river was strong. Seagulls squawked in the air overhead. Connor was crying. We sat on the rocks at the river’s edge and shivered. Looking across to Athens, to the abandoned quarry’s loading dock and the empty silo that used to hold— I didn’t know what it held. The lights of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge were just coming on.
“This is real? This really happened?” Connor asked me, but I could see in his eyes that he already knew, already believed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw it. I blocked it out for a long time, but I remember it now. I remember everything.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Connor asked Solomon, and I gasped, because of course I’d wanted to ask the same question, but I’d had too much sense.
“This isn’t on Solomon,” I said. “He was a kid.”
“I know!” Connor said. “I’m not an idiot. I just mean— I wish I could have . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He wanted to think he could have done something about it, protected his brother, helped him, stopped the bad man from hurting him, even if the bad man was his father.
“It’s okay, Ash,” Solomon said. Then he turned to Connor. “Honestly, for the longest time, I didn’t remember any of this. I had blocked it out, too. I was ashamed. I felt like it was my fault, at least a little bit. Ash and I used to joke about having crushes on your dad. For a long time I thought I’d said or done something to make him think I—I wanted it.”
“Don’t say that,” I snapped.
“Don’t tell him what to say!” Connor snapped back.
A bell clanged, out on a buoy. Seagulls screaked by overhead in the ultramarine sky. The world was very beautiful, and very ugly.
I could see things differently, ever since I’d returned from (the other side) that weird dream under the giant bridge. Like the Truth was closer now. Just out of reach.
“It had been happening for about a year,” Solomon said. “The night Ash saw us—that was the last time. He got spooked, I think. He wasn’t sure what you had seen—what you’d remember. Whether you’d say anything. And then I ran away. . . .”
“Oh, Solomon,” I whispered, and my hand went to my mouth. It was stained and stinking from photo chemicals. It felt like a whole other reality, the darkroom and the photos I’d developed.
But I’d done it. Somehow. Channeled the feeling; fed it, stoked it, pushed it out through my fingertips. And I’d captured images of each member of the team taking part in his Induction Ceremony. Graffiti, arson, all of it. They were blurry, sometimes, or awkwardly cropped, but real, and convincing. When I switched on the full, bright fluorescent overhead light, the pictures hadn’t gone away. Solomon saw only portraits, but I saw. I knew.
And the photos were good, too. Some of them were great, even. They captured something real and vital and complex about each player.
Maybe—somehow—someday—when all of this is over—I could go back to Cass. I could have a future in this.
“You really didn’t remember anything?” Connor asked me, and then hastened to add, “Not that it was on you either.”
“Those days, in the hospital and afterward . . . ,” I said. “They’re still fuzzy. I remember being scared. And confused. I knew something awful had happened, but I didn’t know what. I had these nightmares, so vivid I couldn’t tell them apart from reality. Monsters running through the streets. Bloody broken glass.”
“Me too,” Solomon said.
“Did your mom know?” Connor asked, looking at his feet, at the rocks, at anything but his brother.
Solomon shook his head. “I never told her. I was scared of what he might do. To both of us.”
“She burned his car—”
“Easy, Ash,” Solomon said, and chuckled. “I know my mom. If she had any idea what really happened, she’d be in jail for murder right now. I don’t know what he did to her, but he deserved whatever she did in response. And worse.”
“I wish she had killed him,” Connor said, and slid off his rock and buried his head in the crook of his elbow, the way you do when you sneeze, but he screamed instead. I rubbed one shoulder. Solomon rubbed the other.
I grabbed Solomon’s hand.
“I’m going to be sick,” Connor said, doubling over, pressing his forehead into his knees in a very Solomon kind of gesture. I felt bad, to have split his world down the middle like that. What would it do to me, to know my father was a monster?
But I’d rather know, than not know.
“No wonder you wanted nothing to do with me,” Connor groaned.
“You look like him,” Solomon whispered, but the wind was strong and I wondered if maybe Connor didn’t hear him. I hoped he hadn’t, because I had, and that four-word explanation had gutted me.
Solomon looked out across the river. His eyes widened. I turned, and gasped at what I saw. Flying through the air, two animals: as big and long as trains, glinting in the sunset.
“A water dragon and a fire dragon,” Solomon whispered. “Dragons wander—they never nest or build a home. And when two meet, they have a dance they do. A different one for every two elements. It’s a super-rare sight.”
Connor looked, but then looked down at his feet again. The way you do, when someone describes something that must be a figment of their imagination. Or their madness.
But I could see them. Serpentine creatures, Eastern-style dragons instead of the winged long-neck lizards of Western folklore. They coiled and looped together in an intricate, gorgeous dance. So complex I worried they’d get knotted together. The weird world Solomon lived in was so much better than this one. I almost envied him, that he got to live there all the time.
My meds were working, mostly, but I wasn’t cured. I’d live, but I would never be cured. Not of this.
Solomon said, “I just . . . I had to get as far as possible from everything that reminded me of him.”
“I can’t believe I never knew,” Connor said. And then he opened his mouth and said, “I’m—” But then he stopped, because what could you say? I’m sorry was insufficient, almost insulting. He shut his mouth.
“Words are bullshit,” Solomon said understandingly.
Impulsively, with the urgency of a frightened child, Connor leaped forward and hugged his brother.
I wanted to join in, but I checked myself. There was so much pain between them, so many obstacles, so many walls they’d built up around the little boys they’d been. The brothers who loved each other. They needed to get there together.
A barge moved past us on the river, its deck crowded with crates. I shut my eyes, breathed in and out, memorized every sense impression. The raw, wet muck smell of the river. The cold wind. The sniffling of the boys beside me. It was one of those moments I’d want to be able to remember, years and years later. The little instants that turn us into who we are.
“You had something you wanted to talk about,” I said, twenty minutes later, when we picked ourselves up and brushed off our behinds and headed for the car.
“It’s nothing,” Connor said, wiping one eye. “Stupid bullshit, compared to this.”
“Is it about Sheffield?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell us,” Solomon said. “Even if we can’t punish Police Commissioner Bahrr for what he did, we can still stop the Shield if we know what he’s got planned.”
Connor and I made quick, furtive eye contact, but both of us promptly decided to leave it alone.
“I told him all about the Induction Ceremonies,” I said.
“There’s go
nna be one last one,” Connor said. “The final prank, to close it all out. Sheffield’s own.”
“I thought you still had to go,” I said.
“I’ve been stringing him along, putting it off over and over. So much so that he’s mad at me now. Sheffield’s prank is the biggest and it’s got to be during the Halloween dance, which is why he can’t wait on me anymore. He’s going to burn down the old Greenport School.”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“Because that’s where all the weirdos hang out,” Solomon said. “Right? That’s who he’s been targeting with all this. The people who are different.”
Connor nodded. I hadn’t connected those dots. But Solomon had.
Jewel was religious; didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Didn’t curse. So she made the people who did do these things extra uncomfortable.
Judy was Jewish. That was reason enough for lots of people to hate her.
The nerds and geeks, the suck-ups, targeted in the parking lot minefield.
Solomon, the crazy kid.
It tracked.
“Except that if it burns, so do the woods,” I said. “And so does half of Hudson.”
“He doesn’t care about that,” Connor said. “And he won’t even be getting his hands dirty. He’s got everybody on the team taking on a little piece of it. He says it’s to divide the guilt up, but really it’s because then everyone’s implicated.”
I thought for a moment.
The team. They could stop this. But I’d have to convince them to. The photos I’d developed, using my gift—once I confronted the players with them, I might be able to scare them into doing the right thing.
The sun was hidden behind the clouds, and the sky was getting darker and darker even though sunset was a long way away. On the radio, Ms. Jackson had said the weather was strange, and now out of nowhere we were looking at a thunder and lightning storm, and maybe even snow, if the temperature kept dropping.
I had a lot of driving ahead of me. A whole bunch of football players to visit, and confront.
But before any of that, I had to talk to my mother and father. I didn’t know if they’d know what to do about Mr. Barrett—or if they’d even believe me when I told them—but I had to try.
Destroy All Monsters Page 19
